In Midst Of Outcry Over Missing Native American Women, Investigation Into One Girl’s Death Hints At A Changing Tide
When a 16-year-old went missing in Montana, local and federal law enforcement actually searched for her instead of letting the case go cold. Although it's a far cry from what needs to be done to address the issue, some advocates say it shows that there is progress being made.
The New York Times:
Rural Montana Had Already Lost Too Many Native Women. Then Selena Disappeared.
Jackie Big Hair slept in her car for days, waking every few hours to fire up the engine and gaze at the frozen highway rest stop where her 16-year-old daughter had been reported missing. “I just have to be here,” Ms. Big Hair, 50, said, watching semis lumber across the plains. “I don’t know where else to go.” That was her vigil, along with searches in Billings about 30 miles away, three weeks after her youngest child, Selena Not Afraid, was reported missing from a barren stretch of Interstate 90 in a southern Montana county where 65 percent of the population is Native American. (Healy, 1/20)
In other news —
The Washington Post:
A Radioactive Legacy Haunts This Navajo Village, Which Fears A Fractured Future
The village of Red Water Pond Road sits in the southeast corner of the Navajo Nation, a tiny speck in a dry valley surrounded by scrub-covered mesas. Many families have lived here for generations. The federal government wants to move them out. In what might seem a cruel echo of history, officials are relocating residents to the city of Gallup, about a half-hour away, and surrounding areas. This echo is nuanced, however. The village sits amid a Superfund site loaded with uranium mine waste. Mitigation has been delayed for decades, along with remedies for hundreds of other abandoned uranium mines across the tribe’s lands that boomed during the Cold War. (Ford, 1/18)
